Starlight Life Of The Sage

"Now all of you wait a moment," called out the Magpie leader as he dropped his right fist into his left palm. His eyes were slanted and narrow; they looked small on his box-shaped face. "My team and I pursued something to this clearing. It was at least as strong as me or stronger. I can't see all three of our parties meeting here as a mere coincidence. There's a fourth party at play."

Cara sighed. Her eyes dropped and she felt dejected. Why did killjoys like the Magpie have to exist? Changing the subject right when it was getting good...

"You shut your mouth," replied the teal mage. Cara's eyes perked right up and even began to sparkle. "You're saying you found the monster already? It lead you here? What utter bullshit."

"We didn't see it, but the mana signature it gave off was at least at the peak level of Grand Knight," said the Magpie leader, ignoring the rude mage. "We chased close behind, following its aura to this clearing where it vanished…"

"That doesn't sound much like a beast," said the Knight Captain, interjecting. "If you couldn't see it that means it was probably small, maybe the size of a human... And it lead you to other humans. This sounds like the work of another human."

"Oh, it also made a strange sound. It was a bit like a trumpet combined with rushing water. Maybe the bleating of a goat… It sounded artificial. Certainly wasn't a beast noise..." The Magpie leader trailed off.

There was silence for a moment in the glade. The soft trickling of a nearby stream was all that could be heard. Birdsong returned and none of the parties said a word.

Cara tilted her head in confusion. She wasn't certain what was happening. Why had the three parties stopped talking?

Upon further inspection, Cara noticed that the mana around the three groups seemed strange, as if it were transformed into wires, connected them to one another.

'They have a way of communicating non-verbally,' noted Cara. She tried her best to memorize the mana signatures, but the process was complicated and changed by the second, no doubt due to the information being conveyed. Trying to process it made Cara's head hurt a bit.

-

The silence lingered on. None of the three groups seemed content to leave the spots they were in. In fact, they all seemed to not be moving at all.

Cara gave up on trying to analyze the strange mana application of their communication method. She'd need some formal education in the manner. It resembled Divine Sense communications a bit, but Cara didn't know a way to use her Divine Sense without unlocking the Seventh Spinal Meridian… And she remembered, dearly, how her last attempt at using her meridians felt. Some of them *still* hadn't recovered from that attempt.

A thought crossed Cara's mind. She flicked her wrist and a small wisp of mana formed. It wasn't enough to be detected by the men below her, and she was bored of watching a bunch of people stand like statues.

The properties of mana came to her mind. She messed with the small ball. Mana was extremely ferocious, tenacious, and filled with power. Whatever it touched either adapted to it or was destroyed.

Cara looked inwards at her meridians and, for a moment, wasn't certain just how they had only been damaged during her first idiotic attempt at experimental cultivation… By all rights, the mana should have shredded them to smithereens. So why was she alive, and why were her meridians healing so well?

-

"BEEEEEEEEEEEEP BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP," Cara's alarm blared again. Her mind snapped back to the present and a layer of sweat formed on her brow. All around her were knights and soldiers, each of them keeping their distance but looking on with odd eyes. Most of them had weapons drawn, but a few sheathed them upon seeing her.

Cara turned her head towards the clearing and, finally, noticed that the men standing stock still over there weren't real. They were illusions, created through some strange trickery of mana. She wanted to study the fading apparitions but didn't have the luxury to do so.

Cara touched her pin and quieted her alarm. She definitely needed to make some changes to it. She never considered that it would blow her cover in situations like this. This was why field testing was important. It had been a very long time since she was ever pursued so the thought slipped her mind when she designed the arrays. She wanted to slap herself. Hadn't she been thinking, earlier, that she was so smart for knowing how to deal with pursuers? Karma was a bitch.

"It's a girl," said the Knight Captain, aka Captain Obvious. Cara wanted to slap him too.

"A wild girl," remarked the Magpie man as he looked over Cara's beast skin clothing. "Lass, do you know how to talk?"

"Ah, yes," Cara replied, still a bit dumbfounded at being outsmarted by people literally thousands of years her junior. She felt tremendous embarrassment, and she was truly thankful that her disciples couldn't see her at this moment. They would never let her live this down.

It seemed the three parties deduced, since she lead them all together, that she was nearby watching. That was why they started using non-verbal communications methods, and it was also the reason behind the illusion spell in the clearing. Cara had been careless. She had been overconfident in her abilities.

"Good. I couldn't tell earlier, but now that I'm close I can sense it. You're definitely the one who lead me and my group here," Magpie continued. "Pray tell, why?"

"Yes," said Cara. "The sound you heard, it tells me when people invade my home. I thought you were invaders." She lied off the cuff by mixing truths into her falsehoods. "So I lead you all together, hoping I could make you fight each other."

"So it also tells you where the intruders are?" Asked the mage from the opposite side, his interest suddenly piqued. "That's quite the artifact. I wonder what famous dwarf made that…"

"You're a Grand Knight, right girl?" Asked the Knight Captain.

"Yes." Cara was getting sick of this. She wanted to ask them questions but every time she wanted to start talking they asked another of her. Her curt reply hid some hostility behind it.

"And you look like you're only 13 or 14 years old…" The Knight Captain mumbled. The eyes of the surrounding people changed at those words. The light in them changed from curiosity to greed. They realized that Cara probably used a unique Knight Technique, a high ranked one at that. Cara realized she needed to take control over the situation.

Cara pointed at the mage. "Are you the one who did that… Mirage thing?"

"Yes I am, young Cara." The teal-robed mage smiled.

Cara's eyes went wide and her body trembled.

"How do you know my name?" She asked in a snap. Her train of thought derailed and took the entire station out with it.

"I'm a Mage. As a Grand Knight, you should know…" He paused and shook his head. His tone shifted, and it no longer sounded like he was stating the obvious. "No, I guess from looking at you that you might not know. Mages can cast a spell called 'Identify', letting us see the 'Status' of another person, to a degree."

"So you know everything about me?" Cara asked, disturbed. She felt almost violated by having her personal attributes laid b.a.r.e before another. Her right hand clenched. She considered killing the mage immediately.

"No, actually. I can only see your name and your job as a Spirit Contractor. Your level and everything else is hidden… Which means you are *stronger* than a Grand Knight. In fact, you're probably stronger than everyone here."

At the mage's words, every person in the group flinched. Eyes that held greed vanished, replaced with wariness and caution instead. Cara didn't believe him, though. How could he be so sure she was 'stronger than everyone here' unless he really did see her full Status? She needed to get rid of him...

"You must be a disciple of some old monster," continued the mage, his smile odd, almost lopsided. The group around him seemed to agree with his words. Several men nodded along. "Men, lower your weapons. We're not about to harm a child, let alone a child that could probably kick our asses in a fight."

Cara hated his high pitched voice, but she realized his last thoughts were probably true. The mage, most likely, genuinely believed Cara had some super master... She never considered having a 'master' to rely on. It was a foreign, but uniquely appealing, idea. She had been teaching others for so long she forgot what it felt like to have a teacher, herself!

A melancholic thought crossed Cara's eyes. She wondered that, had she swallowed her pride and asked, if her disciples in her first life would have helped her bridge the Ascendancy Tribulation. Two of them had already crossed it at that time.

In fact, had she asked, Arc would have probably cut down the tribulation for her… That boy grew up to be a bit too strong.

-

It took a moment, but someone finally broke the silent stalemate.

"Spirit Contractor is a pretty good job," said the Magpie man. His eyes looked kind on the surface, but beneath them Cara could feel a tremendous killing intent for some reason. "Tell me, girl, I've heard some rumors... Did you use your strength to wipe out bandits, before?"

"Ah," said Cara, finally putting the pieces together. The reason the Magpie Insignia looked familiar came to her, now. The bandit leader, the first mage she ever fought, also wore that insignia. A rather coy idea came to Cara, an idea she liked quite a bit.

"I avoided the bandits and other people. The strongest monkey monster wiped out some camps a while ago. I found some corpses so I gave them a proper funeral; I burned the bodies on a pyre."

Half truths and truths started to mix. Cara wasn't certain, but she had a feeling some kind of lie detection ability was being used. She wanted to grin, but the subject matter was a serious one, so she kept her lips in a straight line. These poor young'uns thought they could pull one over on The Sage?

She did avoid the bandits—at first. The strongest monkey monster did wipe out some camps—by fighting Cara and using his aura to make a nearby camp of knights run away. She did also find some corpses and give them a proper funeral on a pyre—but she was also the one who made them corpses in the first place.

In all her words, Cara didn't utter a single lie!

The faces of the Magpie leader and his men softened at Cara's words, too. Her intuition had been correct, they were using some method to detect lies.

They wanted to mess with Cara? To accuse her of something? They were 50,000 years too early!